Idle thoughts on cinema in 500 words (give or take a few). by Ian Scott Todd

7.25.2017

French cinema: A short history

I. Jean
Epstein’s La Glace a Trois Faces (1927)
is the cinematic equivalent of a piece of modernist fiction by Gertrude Stein
or Virginia Woolf: jagged, angular, elliptical.
Epstein, whose most famous film remains his evocative adaptation of
Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher(1928), was one of the key figures of the French avant-garde;
slightly less well known than Usher
but just as striking in its design, the forty-minute La
Glace premiered at Paris’ Studio des Ursulines, a salon for Surrealist
cinema. Based on a story by Paul Morand,
it’s comprised of three movements, each one a flashback, in which a vain young
lothario reflects on three lovers he has used and discarded as he hurtles
toward his death (a suicide?) while driving down a country lane. Epstein’s experimental use of editing and
scrambled chronology produces a dizzying series of narrative refractions—hence
the film’s title, which translates to The
Three-Sided Mirror.

The ladykiller: René Ferté with Jeanne Helbling.

II. Jean
Genet’s Un Chant d’Amour (1950) is an
experiment of an entirely different sort, a twenty-five minute wet dream of a
movie and probably one of the most erotic films ever made. Its sexual intensity has as much to do with
the context of its making (as a film that flagrantly depicts male nudity and
gay sex, it had to be smuggled into the U.S.) as with its setting, a male
prison in which the inmates seethe and writhe in solitude, their only form of exchange
being the cigarette smoke blown back and forth through a tiny hole in the wall
that separates their cells. In the
film’s more lyrical passages, the men escape into romantic dreams of horseplay
in the woods. Meanwhile, their actions
are policed by a voyeuristic prison guard with frustrated sexual needs of his
own (after spying on various inmates as they masturbate, he commands one of them to suck his...gun). The entire atmosphere of this film
is suffused thick with desire, especially as the men lie panting on their
prison cots, their hands moving restlessly over their own bodies. Genet would exploit such scenarios of
incarceration and rough trade throughout his literary career, though Un Chant d’Amour marks his only known
attempt at filmmaking (Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Todd Haynes would go on to
try their hands at adapting his work in Querelle
and Poison, respectively).

Male eros: Un Chant d'Amour.

III. Re-watching Chris Marker’s classic
La Jetée (1963), the influence of
which can be found in everything from 12
Monkeys to the “San Junipero” episode of Black Mirror, it occurred to me that perhaps David Fincher was also
trying to channel its air of doomed romanticism in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, his own tale of lovers
thwarted by the dictates of space and time.
But La Jetee says more about
the ephemerality of experience and the mysteries of death in twenty-nine
minutes than Benjamin Button was able
to say in five times that length.
Ostensibly a philosophical sci-fi movie (it’s set in a post-nuclear
future in which, having been driven underground, a group of survivors conduct
experiments in time travel), it’s as a love story that La Jetée feels most resonant.
Our Hero and the object of his obsession—elusive, beguiling, a
mysterious vision out of time, or maybe out of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo—enjoy a few brief moments of
happiness together before the sway of time brings down its hammer upon
them. (So it goes.) As conceived by Chris Marker, the
pulp-fiction/Twilight Zone premise of
La Jetée really only exists as a
means for him to explore his pet themes—memory, history, subjectivity, and, of course, cats—as
movingly as he ever would again in his career.

Love and death: an image from La Jetée. The film, which is actually billed as a "photo-roman", is composed almost entirely of still images.